Pages

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Education Dollars at Work: The DOE’s Private Arsenal

In the wake
of the Sandy Hook massacre, there has been considerable talk about how to make
our schools safer, including the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in every
school. However, this is not why the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Office
of Inspector General bought 27 new Remington Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns
in 2010. Nor were these weapons purchased to improve graduation rates or close
the achievement gap. Rather, these guns were obtained for the benefit of DOE’s
secret identity as an elite education fraud fighting unit.

According to
Valerie Strauss, the guns were purchased to replace
their old guns,
weapons they argue are necessary for their “high-risk” crime fighting duties.
Strauss’ piece in the Washington Post quoted a DOE spokesperson who said the
Office of Inspector General arrests people with criminal backgrounds, including
some with “histories of murder or violence toward law enforcement officers,”
and has “full statutory law enforcement authority.”

The one
example that Strauss gave of such an investigation was a recent search of a
Stockton, California home as part of an investigation of waste and fraud
involving federal education funds.

It seems to
me that if being robbed and embezzled by highly armed, violent insiders is
pervasive enough to warrant having its own heavily armed police force, the DOE has
been wasting taxpayers’ money with NCLB, Race to the Top, and all its other
expensive “reforms.” Instead, they should be implementing sting operations in
every district in the country, creating departments of internal affairs, hiring
undercover agents and turning teachers into Serpicos to root out all this
corruption and vice, and then using the billions of dollars recovered by these
operations to buy schools more books, computers, support staff, librarians,
nurses, counselors and decently paid teachers.